Of Signs, Wonders, Shock and Awe

Prophecies by Nostradamus and Climate Central

“The premonition of apocalypse,” the critic Irving Kristol wrote, “springs eternal in the human breast.” Some summers, like this one, that premonition hangs in the air like haze.

Drought, fires and appalling heat, as well as omens like a Maya calendar that predicts end times, have us rattled. This summer’s hit literary debut from Karen Thompson Walker, “Age of Miracles,” adds kindling to the emotional pyre. It’s about what happens when Earth’s rotation slows and the planet begins to scorch like a marshmallow dangled over a campfire.

As if riding shotgun down the avalanche of these nightmares, here comes a scholarly and freshly translated edition of “The Prophecies,” by Nostradamus, this time stamped with the approval of the editors of the venerable Penguin Classics series. Never mind the Weather Channel. If the Penguin Classics people are telling me to be afraid, then I am prepared to be very afraid indeed.

Michel de Nostradame (1503-66) was a prosperous and well-educated French doctor whose cures, like those of most of the medical men of his time, paid heed to the workings of the stars and planets. At night, alone in his study, like Carl Sagan on peyote, he plugged more fully in to the cosmos. His pen name: Nostradamus.

Working with what he called “natural instinct” and “poetic furor,” and wearing laurel crowns and a sky-blue stone ring, he composed hundreds of quatrains that mix what the French historian and Nostradamus biographer Stéphane Gerson calls, in his introduction to this volume, “astrology, prophecy, melancholy poetry, magic, and history.”

You can read almost anything into Nostradamus’s verse — he intentionally kept things vague — and over the centuries people have. Certain lines are said to have predicted Napoleon’s rise, Hitler’s fall, Hiroshima, the arrival of the Kennedy brothers

(“... three fine children shall be born:/Ruin to the people when they come of age”), the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sept. 11, among hundreds of other events.

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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Among the daft pleasures of reading Nostradamus has always been plucking out word clusters that might apply to one’s own neuroses. When he writes, “I feel that the world of letters shall undergo such a massive & incomparable collapse,” was he predicting the end of independent bookstores? Does his line about “a great nation caught up in dubious war” apply to America’s folly in Iraq?

Tea Partyers can cling to a verse about “delivering a great nation from taxation.” On the same day a deranged man opened fire in Colorado at a screening of Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie, my eyes flickered over these words in Nostradamus: “Deaths at the theater: the proud one flees.”

Prick up your ears, Penn State fans. The name Paternò — referring to the town in Sicily — and a directive to “flee this horrific pest” appear in the same quatrain. Nostradamus’s work, like a vast intellectual junkyard, contains everything and nothing.

This new dual-language edition of “The Prophecies,” translated by the excellent Richard Sieburth, makes a case for Nostradamus as a poet of sweep and impact, albeit one that, as Mr. Sieburth notes, heaps “omen upon omen until a kind of manic hysteria is achieved.” A typical quatrain:

Wailings & tears & great howlings & screams

At Bayonne & Foix & near to Narbonne:

O what dread changes & calamities

Before Mars has completed several rounds.

This volume also seeks to comprehend why “The Prophecies,” whether a literary classic or not, has outlasted most books published during the Renaissance.

Easily the best reason to pick up this edition is Mr. Sieburth’s wry introduction. He observes how Nostradamus has been embraced by “heavy breathers of apocalypse, dotty maiden aunts, late-night viewers of the History channel” and consumers of astrology columns. He compares some of the quatrains to “screaming tabloid headlines” and “prophetic tweets.”

Yet he finds Nostradamus to be a genuine poet, and in some of his work finds “the kind of folksy sententiousness one finds in Ezra Pound’s translations from the archaic Chinese of ‘The Confucian Odes’ — a model I have kept in view throughout my translation.”

The skeptical Mr. Sieburth is more of an admirer of Nostradamus than I am persuaded to be. “The Prophecies” make for dismal, claustrophobic reading. There’s no narrative, no real characters; this writing transmits only on the narrow frequency of garbled caterwauling. Penguin Classics is surely, on some level, joking.

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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Few books will I not reread sooner, agreeing with a contemporary of Nostradamus’s who observed how he conspired to “wrappe hys prophesyes in such darke wryncles of obscuritye that no man could pyke out of them either sence or understandying certayn.”

As poetry Nostradamus’s quatrains are mostly artless and dead on arrival, though occasionally a sunbeam will shoot through the foliage. These lines, for example, seem to evoke a police raid on a Vampire Weekend karaoke contest:

Duke seizes Florence & the diphthong town,

Quite a surprise to young fops & leeches.

And the following quatrain could function as a dream sequence out of a Wes Anderson movie:

When the pet dog rushes up to the man

And after yelps & leaps proceeds to speak:

Lightning having so struck the virgin,

She hangs there in thin air, swept off her feet.

If you must read “The Prophecies,” do so on a hot day with the dread-filled Doors song “The End” turned up on your MP3 player. About Nostradamus we can declare, as Rolling Stone did about Jim Morrison: He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead.

“Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future,” a slim and elegant book written by the scientists and journalists with a nonpartisan organization called Climate Central, is an antidote of sorts to “The Prophecies.”

That is, it’s a book, written in the kind of plain English of which Strunk and White would approve, that lays out what we know about climate change while hewing to the facts and taking great care to avoid bias and hysteria.

It looks forward to likely outcomes for Earth and its people. How high is the water likely to rise? (Two to six feet by 2100.) Will malaria and dengue fever begin to plague us in the Northeast? (Very possibly.) Are scientists really proposing that we halt the warming by shooting flotillas of mirrors into low orbit around the earth? (Yep.)